Love Hurts (And Other Awkward Truths)

Alrighty folks––today's the magic day where we buy chocolate covered strawberries, overpriced lacy underpants, and oysters on the half-shell (as well as furiously  landscape our nether regions).

All, in the name of Love!

So happy Saint Valentine's Day to one and all, and may we collectively increase the peace with our efforts, even just a little bit.

But it's also a good day to reflect on the strange and curious customs surrounding the Mating Game, and to understand with clear eyes what's exactly at stake, and who's pulling whose strings.

Because if you haven't figured it out yet, the Mating Game is rigged and the House (aka, Evolution) always wins in the end.  

📖 So in the name of love, here's a share from my most recent book, outlining the evolutionary pitfalls and potentials of our romantic lives.

We don't need to get jerked around like puppets on the string of an indifferent evolutionary impulse.

We can untie those strings and learn to dance together.‍

Check out the excerpt from Recapture the Rapture‍

Here's a simple fact of life: Humans always figure out how to reproduce, no matter how clueless or misinformed.

🌎 For millions of years we pulled this off with no instruction manual.

It’s the single most effective biological impulse beyond breathing and eating.

It must be, or nearly eight billion of us wouldn’t be here.

This overwhelming imperative underpins some of our deepest pain and our highest potential.

🧬 It’s one of Mother Nature’s dirtiest tricks, but also some of her strongest juju—getting a bunch of distractible primates to fornicate often enough to ensure the survival of the species.

The savage within us all may or may not be noble, as Rousseau wondered.

But evolution is most certainly amoral.

It’s not that love is blind, we are.

We barely acknowledge the driving force that shapes much of our lives.

In no small part, humans are puppets on the strings of evolution.

Helen of Troy and the "face that launched a thousand ships."

Tristan and Iseult.

Romeo and Juliet.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Brangelina.

We like to think our epic tales of romance are testaments to the power of free will and the human spirit.

🧪 But really, they’re just as much a catalog of hormonal imperative.

Evolution doesn’t care at all for our preferences, promises, or taboos.

All it cares about is creating the conditions for the most robust gene pool possible.

’Til death do we part, be damned.

And if you're interested in learning how to beat the system...

Check out Recapture the Rapture and skip straight to Ch. 10, which outlines the work of Kinsey researchers Drs Nicole Prause and Helen Fisher, and see what the upper limits of possible in the realms of hedonic engineering can look like!

Cheers,

Jamie